I've been thinking about documenting my journey with IT, so let's talk about the stuff that my IT knowledge is mostly based on.

Hardware

The best price is free, so I try to find and use used hardware and borrow stuff from work that is no longer needed :)

Currently I'm running 4 separate servers consisting of:

• Custom built home Server with micro-ITX NAS PC with 40 GB of RAM running Proxmox built with Motherboard and case recommended by this video from one and only Wolfgang
• Two raspberry Pi's (5 & 3) running *Ubuntu Server *
• Old intel NUC with 4GB of RAM

For simplicity's sake, I've decided to stick with Debian-based OS systems, since they are the ones I'm most familiar with.

When it comes to home servers builds, I sincerely recommend giving Wolfgang's Channel a go - his videos helped me a lot when it came to ordering stuff and picking the best hardware for cheap!

Software/OS

Like I said previously, Debian-based distros are the most familiar to me, so I mainly use Proxmox and Ubuntu.
Thanks to Proxmox, I'm able to easily spin up new virtual machines, which is very useful, especially when trying new distros or tinkering in general.

Thanks to an awesome project, Proxmox Helper-Scripts, I was able to easily spin up ready-to-go containers and VMs that allow me to self-host most of the stuff that I want to learn, such as Grafana, Docker, Home Assistant, PostgreSQL, etc.

And last, but not least - swamp puppy. The best firewall out there.